


Crowley Invents the Steam Engine

by louwouldapprove



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: 19th Century, Couple's Spat, Fighting, M/M, Trans!Crowley, crowley throws something, top!aziraphale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-01
Updated: 2019-12-01
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:34:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21634462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/louwouldapprove/pseuds/louwouldapprove
Summary: Around 1812 or so, Crowley helped invent the steam engine. Aziraphale is concerned about the effect trains are having on the world. The actual issue is fear about the durability of their relationships and the moral position of Heaven. They have sex and then fight over breakfast.This is part of The World's Not Falling Apart, a series collaboration with jackmarlowe.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	Crowley Invents the Steam Engine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jackmarlowe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jackmarlowe/gifts).



Aziraphale fiddled with the lid of the jam jar. “Open this for me, Crowley, will you?”  
“Open it yourself.”  
Aziraphale gave a sharp little look and twisted the lid harder. It didn’t move. He pursed his lips. “I didn’t want to miracle it. It’s cheating.” He sighed and the jam jar opened.  
They were having muffins, tea, sausages, eggs, plums, and cheese. Aziraphale had made it, had been very insistent about it. There was a hot pot of coffee waiting to be strained in the kitchen, but neither of them had done it yet. It was around one in the afternoon. They hadn’t gotten in the previous night until three or four, after carousing completely inappropriately together in the East End for eight straight hours. They had fucked going to bed and fucked again on waking. Aziraphale felt a little sheepish about the latter, because Crowley had clung to him with his eyes closed and snuggled into him as the sun crept over the sill and he could have just let him sleep. Normally Aziraphale liked watching Crowley sleep. But this morning he had kissed him awake, touched his hips and his chest, rubbed his pelvis against Crowley’s, put his tongue in his mouth, knowing Crowley would respond. Crowley had, of course. His mouth opened at the slightest brush of Aziraphale’s, turned greedy and wanton in a way that after all these years was still exactly what Aziraphale would give up Heaven for, if anyone ever made him. He had uncurled his body from under the covers and bent under Aziraphale, his body burning, sweaty, lovely. They had made ecstatic love in defiance of Heaven and Hell for several hours, and Crowley had come three times and Aziraphale an imprecise number more than that. But Aziraphale knew he shouldn’t have started in again, not so early. They needed their sleep. Crowley couldn’t have slept more than a couple of hours. Aziraphale hadn’t slept at all. He could already feel it creeping in on him, the irritated snappish lonely existentialism of no sleep.  
When the sun had gotten bright enough Crowley noticed it was day, stood up and pissed into the chamber pot in the corner, and asked if Aziraphale had anything to eat. Aziraphale had had to tear himself away from thinking about the fluid rush of their bodies together and put on his nightshirt and trudge downstairs to evaluate his pantry.  
Aziraphale, making the coffee, considered how much he had been fucking Crowley in the last week. He had felt these last few days an almost constant consuming desire to be physically inside Crowley, to make him shake and gasp and grab at him, make him promise things and beg and moan. He was uneasily aware, in the morning light, that he was using this as avoidance tactic.  
“It’s fucking bright in here, Angel. My eyes hurt a little.”  
Aziraphale’s dining room --rather, the one of the three rooms behind his bookshop that he ate in-- was decorated in a slightly outmoded fashion. He had not yet succumbed to the weight and somber colors and detail of mid-nineteenth century interior decoration, and still had wide windows with light yellow drapes, simple dark furniture, and large vases and watercolor paintings on the walls framed in understated little frames. The sun shone in to the eating-room from a high, enormous window which faced a cavity between the bookshop’s building and the next. From ten to one each day, it was a little like being an ant under a magnifying glass.  
“Sorry. I like the light.”  
“What I get. For staying over. Figures.”  
This hung in the air.  
“How’s breakfast, dear?”  
“It’s good,” Crowley said, of the muffins or jam or something. His yellow eyes studied the plate. “Nice to eat real food. Sorry. Thank you.” He breathed out through his mouth slowly. “Thank you for fucking me, too, angel. This morning, and last night.”  
“Are we thanking each other now? Pleasure doing business with you?”  
“I’m thanking you. I don’t know. It’s good, always. Even if the last few days have been off, generally speaking.”  
“You’re welcome,” Aziraphale said, more primly than he needed to. He found himself looking down at his plate as he ate. The muffins had turned out well. They were buttery, salty, crusty and soft.  
The noise of the street drifted in faintly.  
Aziraphale felt Crowley deciding to get into it again.  
Crowley shut his eyes and gritted his teeth together. “And I just want to say, I’m sorry, again, about the trains.”  
“No you aren’t,” Aziraphale said. If Crowley wanted to bring it up, he could deal with it. “If you were sorry you would have told me about it in 1812, instead of keeping it hidden from me, and I would have told you please, don’t, and you would have stopped it. But you’re proud of them.”  
“Proud of the design, yes,” Crowley said. “I’m sorry about everything else.”  
“If you were actually sorry,” Aziraphale said, “you would have them stop making them. Instead they’ve got them all over the place. Paris to Brussels, and in Moscow, and from London to the country. And they’ve got them in Jamaica and in the Carolinas and all over now. Stinking up the air and getting bigger and more horrible all the time and carrying things faster and faster and faster. Did you know they’ve got them carrying animals all around now? Livestock? They’ll be able to ship animals around to slaughterhouses a hundred miles away. They’ll send tons and tons more coal to London every day. Go through all those little towns that get on perfectly fine, are the closest thing to heaven on Earth, barely even know nations exist, and they’ll pollute them and have people travel to the city every day to work. And they’ll be brought low by it. It will destroy them.”  
“It should give them a chance to rise up, though, won’t it? If they’re all so low and if they notice it and talk, and unite, and work to better society, like you’re always gibbering about. If they’re all miserable.”  
“If they do that,” Aziraphale said, setting down his jam knife firmly, “it won’t be because of you. It will be because of their inner decency overcoming a totally unnecessary, ugly, horrible thing. Smoking and dangerous and fast and heavy, polluting the landscape and the people. If you could have just let George Stephenson alone, but no, you had to go and meddle. Now they’re putting in trains underground. Next thing you know they’ll be digging under my shop.”  
“Look, I told you, I’m sorry. If you hate it so much, go tell Heaven to put a stop to it. That’s what you’re supposed to be doing anyway, isn’t it?”  
“Did you know that I heard someone say they might carry soldiers, Crowley?”  
“Did you,” Crowley said. Aziraphale heard the note of exasperation.  
“Imagine a war where thousands and thousands of men are sent at practically light speed along tracks to a battlefield. No moving of the lines of battle. No retreat, a shipment coming in every morning to be killed. No end to war. ”  
Crowley chewed a bite of his breakfast and looked long and hard at Aziraphale, his expression flat and unreadable. He swallowed and took a sip of his tea.  
“I don’t suppose you thought of that,” Aziraphale said, goading as he knew he shouldn’t.  
“No. Why even ask? You know that’s not my style.”  
“But someone you know did.”  
Crowley rolled his eyes.  
“Crowley, tell me. What are they doing?”  
He sighed. “All kinds of things, at this point. Plotting. I expect the humans will think of some of the stuff on their own, but you know Abdiel and that lot. Not subtle.”  
Aziraphale ran a hand through his hair. “I just hate it. I just hate that it’s you. I don’t want to be having this conversation.”  
“Well, fuck, angel, neither do I. I said that already. I keep saying it. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. We have been over this. I have to do something for them once in a while. My fucking luck I strike on something they like. And yes, it’s wicked, terrible, cruel, but I didn’t sit down and go let’s invent a machine for hellish eternal war or endless extraction. It’s a train. It’s a finicky thing about engineering little bits and parts and that’s what I do, that’s what I like, little bits and parts and making things run. You know that.”  
“I just wish you did good things with it. Not infernal devious --”  
“Like you’re so fucking good all the time. You want to stop war, angel, go on down to South Africa and tell them to stop.”  
“Excuse me?” Aziraphale set down his teacup rather hard.  
“Go over and tell the Brits to stop causing famines and stealing things in India and Egypt and Greece and Australia. Call on Gabriel, pester him to change the world. Turn the train tracks to flowers. Turn the coal to food for the poor. Make the rich fall and weep or turn them into rivers or salt.”  
“You know Heaven doesn’t interfere in such visible ways. Heaven works slow. Through the hearts and m--”  
“Heaven doesn’t do a damn shit.”  
“You’re sowing chaos and discord and we’re trying to help fix it before the world ends in fire.” Aziraphale was aware that this was melodramatic and also a serious overstatement of Heaven’s commitment to Earth. “We’re trying to spread hope, and love, and peace in the face of horrible chaos.”  
“Between making batches of muffins and jerking off.”  
“Don’t you dare make this about me. Don’t you dare call me selfish. This is you.”  
“It’s a train. A little funny machine. I didn’t mean it.”  
“They’re going to use it to ruin the world.”  
“Didn’t think about the long arm of history in 1812, did I? I just said, well, here’s something that will be deeply annoying and smog up the air and have a lot of tracks all over that will have to line up and will wear out every twenty years and mean people fight about replacing them. They’ve ignored a dozen other things, figures this is the thing they want.”  
“Give me specifics. What exactly is your lot planning?”  
“Nobody down there really gets what will happen, but there’s a lot of talk.”  
“What exactly, Crowley, or I won’t give you any coffee and I’ll send you home right now and I won’t speak to you for a century.” Aziraphale had never been angry enough to even threaten this before.  
Crowley sighed and looked up at the white arched ceiling.  
“Trains for prisoners being taken to frozen wastes to die all together. Trains for weapons, for soldiers, for poison, for bombs, crossing every continent. Trains for rich people to travel India. Trains for poor people fleeing violence that could get wailaid or blown up. Trains to carry goods out of Africa, America, Australia quicker than ever. Trains to make investors scream in ecstasy and pour all their money into building more trains.”  
“God help you when the reckoning comes and you have to answer for it.” Aziraphale could hear himself getting dramatic.  
“Don’t think the Almighty is going to intervene especially to stop the locomotive,” Crowley said. “Considering everything else. Don’t think the Almighty really actually gives a shit.”  
“It’s still early,” Aziraphale said. “You can make it stop, Crowley. Other things go into fashion and then out again. You can stop this.”  
“Angel, it’s beyond me now. The lords of Hell like them. Do you get what that means? Don’t understand what the blazes they are, but they absolutely love them. What’ll I look like saying, ‘oh, never mind.’”  
“You call me selfish.”  
“Selfish! They’ll ask funny questions. That’s fucking dangerous, angel, for me and for you. I don’t think you’re thinking about our position here.”  
“Our position.”  
“If I went in there tomorrow, and yes, fuck knows I would if it was just a matter of me saying oh never mind, if I went down Below and said oh, hey, call it off--”  
“Can you try?”  
“--then they’d know someone from Upstairs had gotten to me. Had me in his pocket, so to speak. Wrapped around his little finger. And they’d look back and their records, wouldn’t they.”  
“But you can say that you’ve thought of something better,” Aziraphale said, somewhat desperately.  
“They smell bullshit.” Crowley sighed. “You’re not thinking at all, you fucking idiot.”  
“But I want this. I don’t want a world of horrible smog and factories and coal and people travelling to their deaths in fast boxes.” Aziraphale knew what he sounded like. He couldn’t think of another thing to say. “I want a healed world.”  
“You selfish, lazy, stupid entitled brat. You want it, so I have to give it to you, is that it?” Crowley stood up, his eyes flashing, and Aziraphale started a little. But he didn’t move, he just stood there, fists clenched.  
“No,” Aziraphale replied, trying to tame the testiness in his voice. “This is important, though.”  
“I want things too, Aziraphale. I want to not wake up tomorrow with my head in the middle of a puddle of sulfur. I want to live another day. The world is hard. Life is hard. Our labor is exploited to devious ends and we don’t have any control over it. What am I going to do, start a trade union?”  
“Endless war, Crowley.”  
“Not all that different than what’s happening right now. Revolutions, assassinations, loads of old men telling young men and women and children and whoever to die here or there or wherever, slavery and genocide and famine and fighting. So they have wheels, go faster, big deal. Nasty and brutish and short. You’re here eating crumpets, eating chocolate, drinking coffee with sugar milled by slaves. You could have stopped it earlier, if your side really wanted it. But you don’t. You’re not as just as you think you are, or you wouldn’t let people do this to each other. You’re all useless puffed up shit eaters with your heads up your asses.”  
“We’re just--confused. Scattered. In the face of cosmic devastation. But we can repair it.”  
“You and your Luria.”  
“You and I have an arrangement,” Aziraphale said, invoking as much blustering rage as he could. “This violates that. It’ll destroy the world even more than it’s already destroyed. Our world. I demand you try to put a stop to it.”  
Crowley sneered. “Demand, do we.”  
“Demand.”  
“Angel, you’re so full of shit.” Crowley reached down to the table and threw his plate at the wall. It smashed loudly.  
Aziraphale cried out and raised his hands in a defensive gesture.  
“Magic it together again, then. Fix it.” Crowley grabbed Aziraphale’s plate and threw it, too. It smashed. “Fix that shattering, you cunt.”  
“That was stupid of you,” Aziraphale said softly.  
Crowley grabbed the yellow palm-patterned vase from the center of the table and threw it, towards the window. The pane shattered outward into the courtyard. Aziraphale heard a woman cry out and the noise of the vase hitting the ground outside.  
“Crowley!”  
“Fuck you!”  
Crowley upended the table and kicked the vase in the corner over. He walked into the front parlor. Aziraphale heard him kicking things over, opening the door that led into the bookstore, rustling with his coat.  
Aziraphale got up and followed him.


End file.
